Wednesday, April 20, 2016

HOW YOUR RIGHT-WING UNCLE IS GOING TO REACT TO HARRIET TUBMAN ON THE $20 BILL

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce plans to both keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and to knock Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman, sources tell POLITICO.

But will they respond exclusively with racist bile? Oh, no -- some of them will pretend that their objections are fact-based.

I went to the white supremacist site VDARE.com, certain that I'd find something terrible about Tubman. I wasn't disappointed. Relying on a James McPherson essay in The New York Review of Books, VDARE's James Fulford writes:

* Tubman was said to have led 300 slaves to freedom -- McPherson makes it between 57 and 70.

*Many of the fugitives Tubman conducted north were her relatives. That would make her the Moses of her family, rather than of her people.

* Tubman was said to have had a reward of $10, 000, $12, 000, or even $40, 000 for her recapture—the last figure would be equivalent to more than a million dollars today. The largest reward actually posted was $100.

in a 2013 Washington Postarticle, Krissah Thompson acknowledges all that -- though I'm struggling to see how any of it significantly diminishes Tubman's accomplishments. What's wrong with leading dozens of slaves to freedom? And a $100 reward may not seem like much, but there are many ways to measure inflation, and by one measure -- based on wages of unskilled workers -- $100 in 1849 money is the equivalent to $22,600 today. By other measures, it's far more.

* Tubman suffered from some “temporal lobe epilepsy” or “narcolepsy” or possibly “cataplexy” as a result of a head injury. Symptoms, as described by McPherson: “[F]or the rest of her life Harriet would periodically lose consciousness and appear to fall asleep, sometimes for only a few seconds, sometimes for several minutes, and then awaken to carry on as if nothing had happened.” This really terrified the people she was supposed be rescuing -- and raises questions about how much she could really have done.

I read this as a triumph over a serious brain injury, but your mileage may vary.

Now, here's what really sticks in Fulford's craw:

A final point: how did the modern Harriet Tubmania get started? McPherson explains:

For decades after her death in 1913 at the probable age of ninety (her exact birth date is unknown), Tubman languished in obscurity. The only African-Americans who enjoyed historical fame in those years were George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. In the 1930s the labor activist Earl Conrad (Earl Cohen) decided to write a biography of Tubman.

Milton Sennett’s 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, says that while mainstream publishers “ignored Harriet Tubman, interest in her was being cultivated by left-wing organizations, specifically ones connected with the radical labor movement.”

The other thing of interest about Tubman is that she was part of the Khazarian tool, John Brown's, Harper Ferry raid. She helped recruit, and attain funds. This raid is basically what lit the fuse of what was to become the Civil War. Brown was used as a mercenary leader in Missouri, and led and committed several mass murders on behalf of his two, or possible more, Khazarian benefactors.